Man Deletes Entire Company With a Stray Line of Code

A man in charge of his own web hosting business is in quite the bit of modern bother, after having deleted everything on his servers -- including the files of his customers and the software he used to administer everything.

Given that his entire job was managing computers, you'd have thought he'd have known better than to run an aggressive format and deletion script on his own server, but no. He did and everything has gone.

And no, there aren't any backups, as the remote backup servers were mounted at the time and therefore also wiped. Troubled host Marco Marsala asked for help on tech forum Server Fault, pleading: "Last night I accidentally ran, on all servers, a Bash script with a rm -rf {foo}/{bar} with those variables undefined due to a bug in the code above this line. All servers got deleted and the offsite backups too because the remote storage was mounted just before by the same script (that is a backup maintenance script). How I can recover from a rm -rf / now in a timely manner?"

The internet, being its usual self, filled the thread with sarcastic responses, so much so that it had to be locked. The summary being that he's wiped everything, and therefore nuked his entire business, with little chance of recovering even a single animated GIF. [Server Fault via Independent]